Many athletic activities entail the coordination of motions by members of team. Herein, we term such activities “coordinated sport.” To be competitive in coordinated sport, team members must build skill, strength, and endurance and learn to coordinate their efforts. An example of coordinated effort is, in team rowing, the performance of oarstrokes of closely similar timing, duration, and power. Another example is, in tandem bicycle riding, the coordination of pedal strokes. Herein, frequent reference will be made to the sport of rowing and to exercise machines pertinent to rowing, but such references are illustrative, not restrictive: other sports, non-sport activities, and types of exercise machines are contemplated and within the scope of the disclosure.
Teams may be trained by field exercise, e.g., actually rowing a boat on water; however, due to seasonal, weather, and other limitations on field exercise, in practice athletes prepare for and supplement field exercise by working out extensively on trainers, i.e., stationary machines whose mechanics simulate one or more aspects of the sport in question. A typical trainer comprises one or more mechanisms upon which the user's body rests and/or acts (e.g., pedals, oars, seats) and one or more dissipative mechanisms (e.g., air fins, friction pads), typically adjustable, which place energetic loads on the user. A typical trainer also comprises an inertial mechanism (e.g., flywheel) that simulates the inertia of one or more athletes in motion along with the inertia of a watercraft, bicycle, or other gear.
Trainers are most often built to accommodate a single athlete. Single-user trainers do not support training of team members in the coordinative aspects of a given sport, and when only single-user trainers are available, training in the coordinative aspects of the sport can only occur in field exercises. To overcome this problem, the prior art has developed team trainers, relatively large machines that accommodate two or more athletes at one time. For example, the rowing simulator disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 8,622,876 describes mechanical ganging of single-oar rowing machines for simultaneous training of up to 8 rowers. However, in this example, dissipative loads (e.g., ergometers) are driven by each athlete: thus, the performance of one athlete does not dynamically affect the loads addressed by other athletes on the multi-user trainer. In another example, the simulated rowing machine disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 8,235,874 describes ganging of single-oar rowing machines so as to include mechanical coupling of each rower's resistance and recovery mechanism to every other's, enabling the crew to align its power application in a realistic fashion.
Limitations of the prior art for coordinative (i.e., team) training include but are not limited to the following: (1) Athletes working out on isolated machines (e.g., in a single space but not mechanically connected, or in different geographical locations) cannot receive training on the coordination aspects of their sport. (2) All athletes to be trained by a team trainer must assemble at a common place and time to use the team trainer. This entails travel to the common location by all athletes and burdensome coordination of schedules. If one or more team members are not able to attend at the common place and time, training for full-team coordination cannot occur. (3) A training space must accommodate the bulk of the team trainer, whose maximum dimension, for an N-person trainer, will be on the order of N times that of a single-person trainer. (4) Realistic team trainers are significantly more costly on a per-athlete basis than individual trainers.
Techniques are therefore desired by means of which exercise machines can enable one or more athletes to receive realistic training on the coordinative aspects of their sport without requiring multiple athletes to assemble at a single location. Moreover, there is need for such exercise systems to be affordable and compact.